KWOC project report

Saturday, 7 January 2017

BY RAHUL VERNWAL

About KWOC:

Kharagpur Winter of Code is a 5-week long online program
for the students of IIT Kharagpur, who are new to open source software development. The program will not only help students to get involved in open source, but will also prep them for many open source summer programs, Google Summer of Code being one of them.

Projects:

KWOC provides a platform for students new to open source software development to work under the guidance of Mentors. There were about 52 projects based on app development, Webdriver Automation, Chess engine and many more.

Progress:

Having worked with github before it was quite easy to get the procedures. After going through all the projects, I ended up forking 2 to 3. Being new to python and JAVA, it was not easy to get a head start. Therefore I started focussing on a single project "BdayBOT"
related to webdriver automation. My mentor for this project was "Nitin Choudhary".

The aim of the project was to build a "BDAYBOT" using selenium with python. This is a bot that will like and comment 'Thank you' on all the birthday posts posted on your timeline. It uses Selenium to automate facebook login and successively locating the birthday posts using web scrapping.

Having not worked with selenium ever, I had no idea how to proceed? He provided a link related to Selenium with Python, which is really quite helpful for beginners. Thereafter I remained in touch with my mentor, asking for the other such stuffs.

Some of the commits went like this.

Update 1: Changes for liking relevant posts.
I started with searching for bugs in the code. I added the small changes, and sent a Pull Request, mentioning the details in comments.

Update 2: For verification of comment part.
The main problem for the project was the extraction of the comment division in facebook page, and sending some text there. To avoid spamming, they keep on changing the ids of these division every time one refreshes the page. After searching few things on google, finally found the way to do that.

Update 3: Updated readme and some small changes.

Following are some of the screenshots:

Executing the program in cmd.

Sample image taken as a screenshot while the execution of the program.

Searching for the possible bugs and solving other possible issues that may arise, is still in process.
Meanwhile I got to learn a lot about web scraping and webdriver automation.

LOTS OF THANKS TO MY MENTOR "NITIN CHOUDHARY" AND KOSS FOR SUCH A WONDERFUL INITIATIVE.